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Pieter de la Court (1618 – May 28, 1685) was a Dutch economist and businessman, he is the origin of the successful De la Court family. He pioneered modern thinking about the economic importance of free competition and was an uncompromising advocate of the republican form of government. ==Biography== Pieter de la Court was born in Leiden, the son of Pieter de la Court the Elder and Jeanne des Planques. His parents were protestant immigrants from Flanders, who settled in Leiden around 1613 in order to be able to practise their faith and to profit from the rapid expansion of Leiden as the world centre of cloth manufacturing. Pieter de la Court the Elder was a successful cloth merchant before he arrived in Leiden. His wife also came from a family of wealthy cloth manufacturers. They had established themselves as members of the local economic elite by the time Pieter was born. The couple had three other children; Jacob (born 1617), Johanna (born 1620) and Johan (1622–1660). Johan is generally seen as the author of at least two of the books that have later been ascribed to Pieter. De la Court studied at Leiden University and completed his education with a Grand Tour through Europe in 1641 - 1643. He went to London, Saumur (France), Geneva and Basle. The diary he kept during his journey has been preserved and was published in 1928. After returning to Leiden, De la Court entered his father's profession and set up a cloth trading firm with his brother Johan. By 1650 the firm of the two brothers had evolved into one of the leading cloth operations in. In spite of his immigrant background De la Court was able to penetrate the social elite of Holland. He became a close friend of Johan Eleman, who was a member of Leiden's governing council and a relative of John de Witt, the de facto leader of the Dutch Republic between 1653 and 1672. In 1657 De la Court married Eleman's sister in law, Elisabeth Tollenaer, who died only one year later in childbirth. In 1660 death struck again, this time taking De la Court's younger brother and business partner Johan. Pieter was remarried in 1661, this time to Catharina van der Voort, the sister of two wealthy Amsterdam merchants and, again, a relative of John de Witt. It was in this turbulent period of De la Court's life that he published almost all of his books about the political economy of Holland and the larger Dutch Republic. In the preface to the ''Interest van Holland'', the most renowned of these books, he explicitly ascribed this publishing frenzy to the need to distract his mind from the tragedy that had hit him. The centerpiece of this body of work was the ''Interest of Holland'', published in 1662. It contained a critical analysis of the economic success of the Dutch Republic and demonstrated how this success had been brought about by the combined effects of free competition and free (i.e. republican) government. It became a bestseller overnight. In Holland the ''Interest van Holland'' gained notoriety and infamy as a republican manifesto. Abroad the ''Interest'' was widely translated and read as an explanatory guide to the miraculous economic success of the Dutch. De la Court's second wife Catharina van der Voort gave him two children, Magdalena (1661) and Pieter (1664), later named Pieter de la Court van der Voort. In 1665 the family moved from Leiden to Amsterdam, by then the undisputed centre of world trade. There De la Court expanded the scope of his business activities by participating in the ventures of his two brothers in law. De la Court became the leader of a consortium of Amsterdam merchants who sought to break the monopoly of the Dutch East India Company on all trade with the Dutch East Indies. The group filed petitions which claimed that the monopoly was limited to the trade route around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1668 they actually sent an exploratory vessel to the Arctic to find a shipping route around Siberia. The endeavour failed but shows De la Court was an advocate of free trade in theory and practice. De la Court's publishing activity had made him a well known protagonist of the republican "party" in contemporary Dutch politics. This group, consisting primarily of the wealthy businessmen in the cities of Holland and led by John de Witt, effectively ran the Dutch Republic from 1650 until 1672. They strongly opposed the political powers and ambitions of the House of Orange-Nassau which usually held the office of Stadholder, a pseudo-royal position that somehow survived in the otherwise republican institutions of the Dutch Republic, except during this First Stadtholderless Period. De la Court was probably never close to John de Witt, but it has been established that De Witt was actively involved in the writing of De la Court's most outspoken and most widely read text, the ''Interest van Holland''. When the Orangist faction regained control of the country in 1672, John de Witt was lynched by an Orangist mob and Pieter de la Court fled to Antwerp where he stayed with his brother in law Guglielmo van der Voort. He returned to Amsterdam in 1673 where he lived as a merchant until his death in 1685. The last book that was published by De la Court appeared in 1669. A final work, the ''Sinryke Fabulen'', was published posthumously in 1685. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pieter de la Court」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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